Appreciating this piece, thanks! To make clear for audience where the valley's utility power now comes from, it would be great to add a footnote on that. On "the foreseeable future is not about people abandoning cities like Phoenix en masse — it’s about more cities becoming more like Phoenix every year" - i think there may be some extent of 'both/and' - some will abandon and have abandoned hotter locations, more gradually than en masse, while more cities also work at adapting to accommodate residents where they are.
"Queensland's putting laws in place where...nobody's allowed to collect water that falls from the sky.... there's places where there's water tank restrictions and stuff like that because...’no, it belongs to the government...we need every drop of it to fall...so that these assets are worth something that we're selling, and these water rates’."
The full episode is illuminating, also gets into Roma, Aboriginal and other traditional cultures' seasonal migrations. Livable futures, whether populations migrate or commit to a specific landscape, require community-driven governance to come up with sensible systems for essential resource access and distribution.
Great piece (and I loved 'Space is dead', which I read in the book version of Speculative Insights). In addition to all you've said here, perhaps it's also true that one of the reasons we're in this situation is the multiple centuries of trying to heat 'superior' northern places in order to make them liveable.
I fall into climate anxiety every summer since moving back to Phoenix 5 years ago after 20 years away. You have changed my perspective! My historian brother argues similarly and optimistically about the indigenous civilizations that have thrived here and in other deserts for millennia; myopic, apocalyptic think pieces about Phoenix often ignore the technologies and adaptive systems non-Europeans/non-Northerners use(d) to thrive in this climate long before non-natives arrived. Phoenix still uses the same canals that the Hohokam/Huhugam hand-dug, for example. Indeed that is another point about the racism of thermochauvinism.
Appreciating this piece, thanks! To make clear for audience where the valley's utility power now comes from, it would be great to add a footnote on that. On "the foreseeable future is not about people abandoning cities like Phoenix en masse — it’s about more cities becoming more like Phoenix every year" - i think there may be some extent of 'both/and' - some will abandon and have abandoned hotter locations, more gradually than en masse, while more cities also work at adapting to accommodate residents where they are.
Equitable water management is a key factor; Tyson Yunkaporta in a recent June 'cast https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-other-others-3674704/episodes/mongrelling-the-borders-214309483 mentioned at 36 min. an Australian govt foreclosing move:
"Queensland's putting laws in place where...nobody's allowed to collect water that falls from the sky.... there's places where there's water tank restrictions and stuff like that because...’no, it belongs to the government...we need every drop of it to fall...so that these assets are worth something that we're selling, and these water rates’."
The full episode is illuminating, also gets into Roma, Aboriginal and other traditional cultures' seasonal migrations. Livable futures, whether populations migrate or commit to a specific landscape, require community-driven governance to come up with sensible systems for essential resource access and distribution.
Great piece (and I loved 'Space is dead', which I read in the book version of Speculative Insights). In addition to all you've said here, perhaps it's also true that one of the reasons we're in this situation is the multiple centuries of trying to heat 'superior' northern places in order to make them liveable.
I fall into climate anxiety every summer since moving back to Phoenix 5 years ago after 20 years away. You have changed my perspective! My historian brother argues similarly and optimistically about the indigenous civilizations that have thrived here and in other deserts for millennia; myopic, apocalyptic think pieces about Phoenix often ignore the technologies and adaptive systems non-Europeans/non-Northerners use(d) to thrive in this climate long before non-natives arrived. Phoenix still uses the same canals that the Hohokam/Huhugam hand-dug, for example. Indeed that is another point about the racism of thermochauvinism.